Begin each year with Emptiness

Most of what passes for wisdom is really just outcome management with better posture. We want things to go our way, and when they don’t, we assume something has gone cosmically wrong. As if Being made us a promise and then broke it. As if reality ever signed anything. But that expectation is an fundamental error. Reality never agreed to cooperate with our preferences. It just keeps on happening.

What is available, even when the dice roll badly, are certain capacities. Orientation. Responsiveness. The ability to stand somewhere without immediately trying to improve the view. These aren’t consolations, they’re structural. They don’t depend on success, luck, timing, or mood. They’re there whether the plan works or implodes. That’s why they matter more than outcomes, which come and go like weather pretending to be destiny.

Desire collapses, and instead of immediately rushing to replace it with a new want or a new grievance, there’s a pause. In that pause, something opens. Not numbness, not resignation, but space. Emptiness, in the old sense. Not a void, a vast clearing. Something to do nothing with.

A space so large that the problems you were sure were the whole story suddenly look like one sentence, maybe even a footnote.

And once that happens, your problems haven’t vanished, but they’ve lost their greatest power.

They stop pretending they’re everything.